Deprecation

We are no longer providing support for SlackTextViewController. This project satisfied all of our iOS messaging needs in the past and we are proud to have contributed it to the open-source community. Today, in order to delight our users with a solution that is highly tailored and rapidly iterated-upon, we have shifted focus to our internal projects. Unfortunately, this renders us lacking the capacity to support our past projects in addition to our newer, internal projects. This project has been deprecated as a result.

SlackTextViewController

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Please update to >= 1.9 to avoid any risk of app rejection. More details in #361

A drop-in UIViewController subclass with a growing text input view and other useful messaging features. Meant to be a replacement for UITableViewController & UICollectionViewController.

This library was historically used in our iOS app. At its inception, the library satisfied our product needs and was flexible enough to be reused by others wanting to build great messaging apps for iOS.

Feature List

Core

• Works out of the box with UITableView or UICollectionView or UIScrollView
• Growing Text View, with line count limit support
• Flexible UI built with Auto Layout
• Customizable: provides left and right button, and toolbar outlets
• Tap Gesture for dismissing the keyboard
• External keyboard commands support
• Undo/Redo (with keyboard commands and UIMenuController)
• Text Appending APIs

Additional

• Autocomplete Mode by registering any prefix key (@, #, /)
• Edit Mode
• Markdown Formatting
• Typing Indicator display
• Shake Gesture for clearing text view
• Multimedia Pasting (png, gif, mov, etc.)
• Inverted Mode for displaying cells upside-down (using CATransform) -- a necessary hack for some messaging apps. YES/true by default, so beware, your entire cells might be flipped!
• Tap Gesture for dismissing the keyboard
• Panning Gesture for sliding down/up the keyboard
• Hideable TextInputbar
• Dynamic Type for adjusting automatically the text input bar height based on the font size.
• Bouncy Animations

Compatibility

• Carthage & CocoaPods
• Objective-C & Swift
• iOS 7, 8 & 9
• iPhone & iPad
• Storyboard
• UIPopOverController & UITabBarController
• Container View Controller
• Auto-Rotation
• iPad Multitasking (iOS 9 only)
• Localization

Installation

With CocoaPods:

pod "SlackTextViewController"

With Carthage:

github "slackhq/SlackTextViewController"

Manually:

There are two ways to do this:

• Copy and drag the Source/ folder to your project.
• or compile the project located in Builder/SlackTextViewController.xcodeproj to create a SlackTextViewController.framework package. You could also link the library into your project.

How to use

Subclassing

SLKTextViewController is meant to be subclassed, like you would normally do with UITableViewController or UICollectionViewController or UIScrollView. This pattern is a convenient way of extending UIViewController. SlackTextViewController manages a lot behind the scenes while still providing the ability to add custom behaviours. You may override methods, and decide to call super and perform additional logic, or not to call super and override default logic.

Start by creating a new subclass of SLKTextViewController.

In the init overriding method, if you wish to use the UITableView version, call:

Obj-C

[super initWithTableViewStyle:UITableViewStylePlain]

Swift

super.init(tableViewStyle: .Plain)

or the UICollectionView version:

Obj-C

[super initWithCollectionViewLayout:[UICollectionViewFlowLayout new]]

Swift

super.init(collectionViewLayout: UICollectionViewFlowLayout())

or the UIScrollView version:

Obj-C

[super initWithScrollView:self.myStrongScrollView]

Swift

super.init(scrollView: self.myStrongScrollView)

Protocols like UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource are already setup for you. You will be able to call whatever delegate and data source methods you need for customising your control.

Calling [super init] will call [super initWithTableViewStyle:UITableViewStylePlain] by default.

Storyboard

When using SlackTextViewController with storyboards, instead of overriding the traditional initWithCoder: you will need to override any of the two custom methods below. This approach helps preserving the exact same features from the programatic approach, but also limits the edition of the nib of your SLKTextViewController subclass since it doesn't layout subviews from the nib (subviews are still initialized and layed out programatically).

if you wish to use the UITableView version, call:

Obj-C

+ (UITableViewStyle)tableViewStyleForCoder:(NSCoder *)decoder
{
    return UITableViewStylePlain;
}

Swift

override class func tableViewStyleForCoder(decoder: NSCoder) -> UITableViewStyle {
    return .Plain
}

or the UICollectionView version:

Obj-C

+ (UICollectionViewLayout *)collectionViewLayoutForCoder:(NSCoder *)decoder
{
    return [UICollectionViewFlowLayout new];
}

Swift

override class func collectionViewLayoutForCoder(decoder: NSCoder) -> UICollectionViewLayout {
    return UICollectionViewFlowLayout()
}

Sample Project

Check out the sample project, everything is demo'd there. There are 2 main examples (different targets) for testing the programatic and storyboard approaches, and a Swift example. Most of the features are implemented for you to quickly start using them.

Feel free to contribute!

Features

Growing Text View

The text view expands automatically when a new line is required, until it reaches its maxNumberOfLinesvalue. You may change this property's value in the textView.

By default, the number of lines is set to best fit each device dimensions:

• iPhone 4 (<=480pts): 4 lines
• iPhone 5/6 (>=568pts): 6 lines
• iPad (>=768pts): 8 lines

On iPhone devices, in landscape orientation, the maximum number of lines is changed to fit the available space.

Inverted Mode

Some layouts may require to show from bottom to top and new subviews are inserted from the bottom. To enable this, you must use the inverted flag property (default is YES/true). This will actually invert the entire ScrollView object. Make sure to apply the same transformation to every subview. In the case of UITableView, the best place for adjusting the transformation is in its data source methods like:

Obj-C

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    UITableViewCell *cell = [self.tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:kCellIdentifier];
    cell.transform = self.tableView.transform;
}

Swift

override func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
        
    if let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier(kCellIdentifier) {
        cell.transform = self.tableView.transform
    }
}

Autocompletion

We use autocompletion for many things: names, channels, emoji, and more.

To set up autocompletion in your app, follow these simple steps:

1. Registration

You must first register all the prefixes you'd like to support for autocompletion detection:

Obj-C

[self registerPrefixesForAutoCompletion:@[@"#"]];

Swift

self.registerPrefixesForAutoCompletion(["@", "#"])

2. Processing

Every time a new character is inserted in the text view, the nearest word to the caret will be processed and verified if it contains any of the registered prefixes.

Once the prefix has been detected, didChangeAutoCompletionPrefix:andWord: will be called. This is the perfect place to populate your data source and show/hide the autocompletion view. So you must override it in your subclass, to be